alks about
subscription-lists, and ways and means of support and to the young
people's plans and preparations for a great fair to be held for the
purpose of obtaining funds for the future furnishing and adorning of the
parsonage. So it was a happy era in the history of the congregation and
the village. Everybody was interested, almost everybody was pleased.

If Mr Maxwell had heard half the kind and admiring things that were
said of him, or if he had known a tenth part of what he was expected to
accomplish by his sermons, his example, his influence, he would have
been filled with confusion and dismay. But happily "a wholesome
silence" with regard to these things was at first for the most part
preserved toward him, and he took his way among his people unembarrassed
by any over-anxious effort to meet expectations too highly raised.

To tell the truth, he was getting a good deal more credit than he
deserved just at this time. His devotion to his work, his labours "in
season and out of season," his zeal and energy, and kindness in the way
of visiting and becoming acquainted with the people, were due less to a
conscious desire to do them good, or to serve his Master, than to a
growing pleasure in friendly contact with his fellow-creatures. He was
entering on a new and wonderful branch of study, the study of living
men, and he entered upon it with earnestness and delight.

Hitherto his most intimate acquaintance had been with men, the greater
number of whom had been dead for hundreds of years. His living friends
had, for the most part, been men of one type, men of more or less
intelligence, educated on the same plan, holding the same opinions--men
of whose views on most subjects he might have been sure without a word
from them. His intercourse with the greater number of them had been
formal and conventional; upon very few had he ever had any special claim
for sympathy or interest.

All this was different now. The interest of the Gershom people was real
and evident, and he had a right to it; and he owed to them, for his
Master's sake, both love and service. They were real men he had to deal
with, not mere embodiments of certain views and opinions. They were men
with feelings and prejudices; they were men who, like himself, sinned
and suffered, and were afraid. They had opinions also, on most
subjects, firmly held and decidedly expressed. Indeed, some of them had
a way of putting things which was a positive refre